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Oyster Short Cake
1 quart flour. 3 teaspoonfuls baking powder. 1 tablespoonful butter. A pinch of salt. Enough sweet milk to moisten well.
Roll about one inch thick and bake on tin pie plates quickly While it is baking, take one quart oysters and one-half cup water and put on the stove; then take one-half cup milk, and one-half cup butter mixed with one tablespoonful flour, and a little salt or pepper; add all together and boil up once.
When the cakes are done, split them open and spread the oysters between them, and some on the top. Put the oysters that are left in a gravy-dish and replenish when needed.--Mrs. K.
A savory shortcake: a thick baking-powder biscuit split and filled with creamed oysters. The whole thing depends on not cooking the oysters past the moment their edges curl.
- The hinge: "boil up once"Oysters toughen within a minute or two of hitting heat. Bring the liquid and the butter-flour mixture to a boil first, slide the oysters in, and pull the pan off as soon as the edges ruffle — roughly two minutes. Anything longer gives you rubber in a thin sauce.
- A quart of flourFlour was measured by volume in bulk: a quart is 4 cups, about 1 lb 2 oz or 500 g of all-purpose. Scale the rest accordingly if you want a smaller cake.
- Leavening runs lightThree teaspoons of baking powder to four cups of flour is about half what a modern biscuit uses. Period baking powders were single-acting; with today's double-acting powder, 4 to 6 teaspoons gives the lift you expect from a one-inch round.
- Sweet milk and "a pinch of salt"Sweet milk simply means fresh, unsoured whole milk, distinguished from the buttermilk or clabber also in the pantry. The pinch of salt is genuinely under-seasoned for this much flour; 1½ to 2 teaspoons is closer to right.
- "Bake quickly"The text asks only for fast baking; in modern terms that suggests a hot oven, somewhere around 425–450°F. Expect a one-inch round on a tin pie plate to take roughly 15–20 minutes, until the top is set and browning — watch it rather than the clock.
- A quart of oystersThat means shucked oysters with their liquor, roughly 2 pints — perhaps two to three dozen or more, depending on size. Use the liquor in place of the half cup of water; it is the whole flavor of the sauce.
- The sauce is loose by designHalf a cup of butter and one tablespoon of flour will not thicken to a gravy — this is a buttery, barely bound liquid meant to soak into the split cake, which is why Mrs. K. sends the surplus to the table in a gravy dish. If you want it to cling, cook the flour into the butter first and work up to 2 tablespoons.
- YieldEnough dough for more than one pie plate; the recipe says "plates" in the plural. A supper dish for several people.
Housekeeping in Old Virginia, compiled by Marion Cabell Tyree and published in 1879, drew on contributions from some two hundred and fifty Virginia and Southern housekeepers, many recipes signed with an initial or a name — Mrs. K. is one of that chorus. Oysters run through the book at a density that startles modern readers: fried, scalloped, pickled, in fritters, in soup, in patties. Chesapeake beds were still yielding enormous harvests in the 1870s and 80s, and shucked oysters by the quart were cheap enough to be an everyday protein rather than a luxury, shipped inland by rail in tins and kegs. Shortcake here carries its older, plainer sense — a rich quick bread split and filled — with no necessary connection to strawberries; savory versions filled with creamed chicken, veal or shellfish also appear in American cookbooks of the period.